The doyen of British travel magazines, Wanderlust, has finally dragged itself kicking and screaming into the digital age and got itself a decent website! This rapidly evolving site is aiming to place the last five years of the magazine in a searchable archive. Much of this work is already there!

Some of the diverse highlights of this eclectic site include an exploration of East Timor, a journey to theSource of the Ganges and a tale about swimming around the Greek islands.

There are a number of regular columnist featured in Wanderlust, including Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler and family travel guru Will Gray. If you are inspired by Will’s tales of travelling the world with his twins, then check out his new guide to family travel Footprint: Travel With Kids.

There is a lot more to this site as well, including travel advice, interviews and a soon-to-be-launched social network for travellers.

There are some habits that are so ingrained in us that we forget they’re there, like background noise, until someone points them out to us. A way of sitting, a morning ritual, a nervous tic. The habits that irritate, and the habits that provide a soothing rhythm to our lives.

I have few habits related to music (always excepting the Beatles, which I was practically suckled on) except a single weekly one that has fed my thirst for Celtic music for nearly fifteen years. In that time, I have cancelled social engagements, shoved guests out the door without ceremony, and rearranged radio locations, all so I could listen to the Thistle & Shamrock.

Broadcast from Edinburgh to a US audience through National Public Radio, this show devoted to Celtic music has been a landmark for Scottish and Irish folk since 1981, when Fiona Ritchie, with her delicious Scottish burr, established an unexpected touchstone with a one-time fundraising special.

Over two decades later the Thistle & Shamrock continues to entertain Celtic music lovers by broadcasting traditional and cutting-edge albums mixed with poetry, interviews, and folk music festivals. Its only drawback is that you have to find when it plays on your local NPR station (in the US) — I add my voice to all those begging Ritchie to broadcast the full show on Thistlepod, her podcast featuring new albums and artists.

I’ve loved Celtic music since I was a little kid, and have listened to Fiona Ritchie for most of my adult life. I could have stayed ensconsced forever in the world she formed through traditional artists such as The Cheiftans. But in recent years I’ve noticed that more of her shows are devoted to Celtic music abroad, from Brittany to Botswana, not only the effects traditional Irish and Scottish tunes have on worldwide folk music, but the effects felt in reverse.

This week’s show was devoted solely to that issue: “21st century contemporary Celtic music may take in Balkan tunes, African percussion, and Latin rhythms,” says Fiona. “Does it all simply boil down to world music soup, or is this cutting edge Celtic?”

True, it was hard to hear the ‘Celtic’ in some of the African rhythms or Eastern European beats broadcast, but I’ve always seen Celtic music as connecting easily to worldwide folk genres such as bluegrass. One feeds into another. In fact, one of the best concerts I ever heard was over ten years ago in a small auditorium. My small liberal arts college, located in the Midwest and started by a Scotsman, boasted at that time both an active bagpipe band and a popular African drumming program. It also hosted one of the largest Scottish fairs in the US. After one of these fairs, the bagpipe and African drumming groups played together, and as I listened I thought I’d never heard true folk music before dancing to bagpipes blasting ‘Scotland the Brave’ through the stomping rhythm of a huge African percussion group.

Fiona Ritchie had it right when she said that true Celtic music was enhanced by other world music, and vice versa. I love traditional Celtic, but it comes from the same place as all other folk: the heartbeat of a culture, and that rhythm is the same worldwide.

It seems like the dismal news about air travel never ends. Usually it’s delays, the increasing delays and prospect of more of them in the future. Sometime in the last two years I read an in-depth article about the outsourcing of airplane maintenance to non-FAA-approved foreign contractors leading to lowered standards of air safety.

Now the unhappy news is leaking out slowly to MSNBC from a strange source: NASA. The US space agency performed a massive survey of pilots regarding the true state of air safety. The results? Supposedly so not-pretty that the agency is refusing to disclose them. And why? You can probably guess. “A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public’s confidence in airlines and affect airline profits” due to lowered customer confidence. NASA has actually gone to the lengths of ordering the outsourcer that performed the survey to purge the data from its records.

Some snippets of scary results:

“Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced ‘in-close approach changes’ — potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.”

NASA has refused Freedom of Information Act requests for the survey results from the Associated Press, but now that the story has made it into the mainstream media, I don’t see it going away anytime soon.

A case of what you don’t know could actually kill you? Or just another scaremongering news story that we shouldn’t waste time worrying about?

Like many excellent travel books, Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold is classified as Nature writing rather than travel literature. Travel, however, is certainly what Ehrlich does in this book, following chilly weather cycles to touch down in three places: southern Patagonia, Spitsbergen east of Greenland, and her own freezing tent in Wyoming.

I’ve always had a problem reading Gretel Ehrlich. She’s a writer whose work I desperately want to like. I keep coming back to her because I have few kindred spirits, writerly or otherwise, in a pure love of winter and ice and cold. But there is something in her work that always holds me back, a style that whispers a little too much of spirituality — a part of me wants to say “pseudo-spirituality,” but it’s unfair to judge another’s experience. It’s a characteristic of several good writers whose work I don’t like that they are long-term Zen practitioners, which perhaps accounts for the extensive use of short, staccato sentences that flash past too frequently to hold my attention. (An odd combination, the Zen and writing I dislike, considering I myself am a devotee of yoga and meditation.) Ehrlich, while a talented writer, is one who engages in a style I simply don’t enjoy reading.

Having faced my own bias, I wouldn’t dare call this book, or any other of Ehrlich’s, bad. Even I, who react against her writing style, acknowledge that she’s an excellent writer, who has become an acknowledged expert on Greenland native culture and writing about the remote places inhabited by ice.

The Future of Ice, with its scenes on three continents, with many experiences of winter, is comprised of tiny chapters, each a snowflake of experience. Ehrlich teases readers with a new love interest, Gary, in Patagonia; memories of traumatic events in over two decades of Wyoming winters; and the gravitational pull of scientific and artistic personalities on an Arctic ice boat.

The Future of Ice seems to promise more than it delivers, but that problem is perhaps due more to marketing than to any shortcomings of the writer. Rather than focusing on the way cold affects our perceptions and consciousness, and how our very thought processes will be changed by “deseasoning” (the loss of winter), Ehrlich has written a very personal book that tells much more about her own abstract, poetic view of the world around her, than about the world itself. Zen poetic near-introspection speckled with scientific fact.

That’s not to say Ehrlich’s book isn’t good — it is — but the writer’s use of language forces the reader into a reaction of love or boredom. Take this passage:

“Inside cold there are musical notes: once, while I walked in hunger and fatigue across the center of northern Greenland’s Warming Land, where no human had ever ventured, rays of light sprayed out from the ends of my feet. Each time I stepped down, a burst of music erupted. The earth was a piano and my feet were searching for chords. … Winter is a white vagrancy. There are no days or nights. Just breathing and snow pushing space between thought. I rub my neck. Where lightning drove through me, snow recongeals on neural substrates. By afternoon I feel as if I can touch all the way back to the cells of my brain.”

I know many people who would respond to the above words with adoration, whereas my reaction is impatience. Maybe I’m too literal, maybe my scientific background is irritated by the lack of solid grounding. The best part of Ehrlich’s book is the middle sections placed in Wyoming. Here, in her solid, cold, sometimes heartbreaking life, Ehrlich isn’t pushing so hard to infuse everything with meaning.

The Future of Ice is a book that many people will enjoy reading, and, as with much nature/travel literature, an important one. The section on the Arctic, in particular, lays out the stark facts of the poisoning of the climate above the Arctic circle — the high levels of PCBs, for example, found in the breast milk of Inuit women, and the acid rain falling on glaciers. Maybe I have a problem reading it not because of Ehrlich’s writing style, but because it’s filled with the sort of inarguable observations that make me wonder why I am having children. A world without ice might rely less on heating oil, but the prospect of it fills me with the magnitude of what, as a species, we’re losing.

Why is it that when fortunate circumstances allow a stop at a swank restaurant or an overnight in a rather expensive hotel, I’m often disappointed?

Perhaps I’ve been a budget-minded traveler for so long, it’s simply become too painful to let go of my cash, but I don’t think so.  I enjoyed a few too many spendthrift years when it was not painful in the least to spend money (just ask some of my longtime shopping companions.) 

I’m not congenitally tight-fisted, but I like to get what we Americans call “bang for the buck.”  If I spend big money, I expect big satisfaction, because that’s what the swank places are selling us.  When they fail to deliver, it’s usually NOT from lack of Frette linens on the bed or because some exotic fusion food on an oversized plate didn’t rock the taste buds.

The expensive places tend to ruin their own experience through blasé service.

Through the generosity of a dear friend, I recently spent time in the bar of the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Every “Gold List” and “World’s Best” says it’s the place to go in that charming and distinctive Southwestern city. 

Yes, their Silver Coin margarita was the best I’ve ever had, and the late afternoon lunch was delicious, but the service was atrocious for an upscale establishment.

I was with two other women; we were decently dressed and very polite.  It was not that busy in the bar area, although it was a Balloon Fiesta weekend so that part of the state was crowded. 

The server was not rude; she merely ignored us. 

Drink glasses sat empty, the bill had to be asked for and asked for again, and meantime we could see her chatting up possibly more interesting patrons over at the bar. 

Is this an end of the world event?  Of course not, but I expect more, a LOT more, at a place that sells itself on its own wonderfulness.

My friend who actually paid the tab was mortified, and said over and over that she’d never had a bad experience there before.  I do believe her, but when you position yourself as the crème de la crème, you’d better deliver every single time.

Every single time with every patron, you high-end hotel and restaurant folks, so train your staffs with that in mind.  You’re charging me enough; you can afford it.

They lost their one shot with me.  Next time, if I have money, I’m checking out La Posada de Santa Fe or some other establishment in town.  

You know, when I check in at your basic Hampton Inn, a U.S. hotel chain, I get invariably cheerful service, a good breakfast and free WiFi.  If I ever run into a bad Hampton Inn, I’ll probably cut them some slack, because they do not trumpet a ”luxury” status or try to impress me with W Hotel attitude and pretentiously hipper-than-thou silliness. 

Who charges big bucks and hasn’t disappointed me? 

The Algonquin Hotel in New York City – great accomodations, but more importantly, friendly and welcoming service without any ‘tude.   The Restaurant De Silveren Spiegel in Amsterdam is typically Dutch in its open friendliness.  The Park Hyatt Tokyo; expensive food and well worth it, plus a gracious staff.   The Grand Hotel in Nancy, France, welcomed my two kids, which was important because one of them is named Nancy and she was very excited to visit their pretty city in Lorraine.

Where did I get the best meal with superb service while visiting New Mexico?  A local joint called Christy Mae’s, a few blocks away from old Route 66 in Albuquerque.   The waitress stuffed us with great food and made us laugh; I’d have paid double for the pleasure.

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